Transmission Project - honest practice

Honest Practice: How the Public Sector Can Look at Itself (New article in Resources)

Howie Fisher — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 16:15:47 +0000

We provide here a detailed summary of the article “Honest Practice: How the Public Sector Can Look at Itself” by Howie Fisher with illustrations and design by Billy Brown. Download the full pdf from attachments.

In this article the Transmission Project contests the convention of collecting “best practices” and offers in its place a narrative approach to assessing nonprofit organizations’ capacity building efforts. The Transmission Project calls this approach Honest Practice.

So-called best practices claim to encapsulate successful organizations’ hard-earned knowledge and experience in the form of simple, ready-to-use solutions. Practices are canonized with little regard for what led to success. Research in the field illustrates that what “best practices” obscure is the hard work it takes to get a practice to function correctly in a new environment. The Transmission Project’s observations as capacity-building practitioner attest to the potential pitfalls of blindly adopting so-called best practices.

Although multiple accounts corroborate the risks associated with “best practices,” they remain popular among organizations – primarily as a way to appeal to funders in terms they can grasp. The diversity of nonprofit sector work complicates attempts to establish reliable ways of measuring success while making meaningful comparisons across the field. With the endorsement of funders, “best practices” become a way to discriminate superficially between organizations that do good work and organizations that don’t work.

We explore the depth of the problem. When organizations chase so-called best practices, they under-invest in other forms of overhead. These include evaluation and tracking systems that, when neglected, leave organizations unable to define and measure success on their own terms. The cyclical nature of the problem makes it difficult to address head-on. Without proper infrastructure to measure and understand their work, organizations lose track of their needs and cannot challenge the prescribed standards of excellence.

The fundamental importance of evaluation having been established, the evaluator or researcher emerges as an influential force in representing organizations’ work to funders and the rest of the field. The author suggests that the real challenge is insisting upon a more narrative, process-centered approach to discussing capacity building work as opposed to a myopic focus on success in terms of end results.

The article offers examples of the kinds of qualitative questions writers and researchers can ask. What follows is an analysis of the Transmission Project’s own attempts to evaluate its work without the full support of its funders to do so.

We conclude that while researchers can influence the field by keeping context intact when discussing organizations’ work, evaluation entails not only collecting information, but also processing and integrating it into an organization’s operations. As opposed to relying on “best practices” as markers of success, funders need to provide organizations with the resources to invest in tracking systems to build their capacity to define success, measure it, and articulate what they need to perform better.

Honest Practice: How the Public Sector Can Look at Itself

admin — Thu, 24 Mar 2011 17:12:20 +0000

An article about the pitfalls of subscribing to so-called best practices. An alternative is offered in the form of Honest Practice: a narrative approach to evaluation that contests the copy-and-paste mentality that plagues our field.

Written by Howie Fisher with illustrations and design by Billy Brown

Making Best Practices Adequate

Ben Sheldon — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 20:26:04 +0000

The Transmission Project has long made the argument that it is a lack of resources and capacity that prevent organizations from successfully adopting best practices, not ignorance of those practices. Our focus on honest practice recognizes the need to take a broader focus on an organization’s capacity and environmental context.

From Adapt and Adopt: An Experiment in Making Best Practices Adequate in an Organization [PDF], by Nelly Burrin, Gil Regev and Alain Wegmann:

So called best practices promise many advantages to organizations that adopt them. Reusing these practices, however, requires their adaptation to the specific context of each organization. This adaptation means that for a specific organization, the practices cannot be best. They can, at the most, be good or widely used, but not best.

…that term “Best Practices” is an oversell. It essentially hides the need to adapt any practice to the context of a specific organization. Organizations would do well to not get blinded by the marketing promise of best practices and remember that much work is needed before they can be used.

“a best practice framework is really an exercise in organizational and cultural change. Failing to realize that can be a recipe for disaster”

Revisiting Honest Practice

Belinda Rawlins — Wed, 29 Sep 2010 18:44:01 +0000

Looking back through my writings about honest practice, I came across this piece originally published in the NAMAC eBulletin.

“You can’t copy your way to the top.”

This “meta lesson” from The Contrarian’s Guide to Leadership struck me when advising a colleague on a grant that wanted applicants to document the use of “best practices” in their proposed project. The real kick was that the funder was only interested in new projects and proclaimed to support innovation.

My mind reeled. If “best practices” are the standards of excellence within organizations considered high performing, how can it be expected that those standards could be immediately implemented in startup programs? What of differences in organizational culture and constituencies, not to mention technical and information systems? Is innovation supported if funding follows conventional wisdom? How do we know that wisdom is valid when our industry is trained to share only the lessons of success and not of failure?

Organizations need support not just in their success, but also in their mistakes. Since the funding community is unlikely to be first jumping on this bandwagon, I propose cultivating space to learn from the honest practices we experience every day. Encourage reflection on reality when possible.

More on learning from mistakes

Belinda Rawlins — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 21:22:11 +0000

No one is immune to making mistakes.
And I have to express admiration to those who will admit it, learn from it, and make the changes necessary to respond to it.
But to make mistakes and changes at such a high level and talk about it, well, that’s like superhero stuff to me.
Take this week’s announcement from the White House:

White House officials are retooling the administration’s communications strategy to produce faster responses to political adversaries, a more disciplined focus on President Obama’s call for “change” in Washington and an increasingly selective use of the president’s time.

The messaging adjustments are the result of an end-of-the-year analysis in which White House advisers said the president’s communications team had not taken the initiative often enough and had allowed drawn-out debates in Congress, and relentless criticism by Republicans, to drown out his message.

Sure, it’s a political move. But what do any of us do for our organizations that isn’t, in essence, a political move to build support and resources for us to do our work better? We constantly hone our messages, revise our plans, and change our methods.
If we keep our eye on the long view, know why we do what we do, and admit why we’re doing it, we can build movements built on trust and openness.
Administration, I say to you: Keep on learning.

Honesty is such a lonely word

Belinda Rawlins — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 22:11:22 +0000

At the Transmission Project, you hear us talking about the concept of honest practice rather than best practice. We believe it is equally, if not more, instrcuctive to examine more than what worked. We want to know about surprises, the unexpected, even the failures.

I perked up when, in my RSS reader, I spotted this in a recent post at Museum 2.0:

What’s the best way to share information about your experiments–what worked and what didn’t? Publish.

There are many other fabulous reports out there to learn from, but there are far more languishing in file cabinets. I was a bit surprised as I worked on the book at how often I could get access to a evaluation report with some sleuthing and asking–and how infrequently those reports were publicly available in any form. Please, if you go to the time and expense of evaluating your institution’s projects, find a way to share what you’ve learned.

Nina Simon shares evaluation and research studies on participatory projects in museums. I highly recommend checking out these links as much of what you’ll find has great application in many public engagement efforts.

Check back here regularly for artifacts and stories from the projects we support at the Transmission Project. And let us know what you learn.